1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a foil transferring apparatus and an image forming system using the same, in which a foil image is transferred on a desired toner image among all the toner images on the base material on which the images have been formed.
2. Description of Related Art
In a bookbinding field, a commercial printing field, a card business field or a plastic molding field such as cosmetic container, printing has been performed such that a character and/or a picture image made of foil are transferred to a sheet of paper in order to give metallic appearance or a high-quality glossy image to a product, which cannot be expressed merely by common printing.
In recent years, foil transferring technology has been utilized for anti-counterfeiting a cash card or a credit card and for a hologram provided for a security.
As the foil transferring technology, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. S62-255184 discloses a simplified thermal transfer printing apparatus in which a foil sheet having a foil layer on a film base member is placed on base material having a toner image for electrostatic copying while the foil layer overlaps the toner image to each other and by applying any heat and pressure on them from above, the foil layer is transferred to the toner image.
Further, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. S63-286399 discloses a foil image forming method for forming the foil image. In this method, a toner image is formed on a sheet of paper, a color foil is applied thereto using a thermo compression bonding, and a foil image is transferred to supporting medium using the color foil from which a color layer of the portion contacting with the toner image is removed. Namely, in this foil image forming method, an foil image is formed by the following steps of: (1) A negative image in which an original image is reversed is copied to form a negative image copy; (2) Plastic foil for foil-stamping is stamped to the negative image copy using a thermo compression bonding; (3) By then separating them from each other, a color layer of a portion contacting with toner is adhered onto the negative image copy and remains thereon; (4) On the other hand, a positive image of the original image remains on the plastic foil for foil-stamping; and (5) The positive image of the original image is stamped to supporting medium such as polyvinyl chloride sheet using a thermo transfer printing.